Founded in Oxford, England in 1984, Verse is an international journal that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. The print edition publishes portfolios of 20-40 pages, while the Verse site publishes book reviews and individual poems. Verse is edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

NEW! Two poems by George Elklund

George Elklund

Two poems

PAVANE

To endure the severe currents Trapped in the brain
One needs a strange bird call That comes only in sleep.
The mind wants to begin again in dark berries But finds it difficult to un-know itself.
It takes a large poisonous bug
To keep my creature in its cage.
How far from your mind is the sea?
My mother cannot find rest anywhere.
I begin to collect parables of sand
And coins that once were Spanish.
The mind makes its phone calls to no one; The orbit of the gray matter
Is difficult to escape.
My daughter made a dinosaur
Out of paper and tape.
The crows in their long history
Know the echo of an opera not yet written And the bleeding mechanismOn the new Pope’s head.

BAY OF STARSIf the hands dehydrate
Something must have happened In the dream of the mind.
O sacred head surrounded
By the crowns of rivers
And the loam of the dead
The silt of time
The ecclesiastical flow
Of the eddy pools
Where my brother liked to fish. Tom, I like to imagine
You will come for me
And we might find ourselves
On a sunny incline
Overlooking the bay of stars Crashed upon the waters.
What is the history of a nerve What is the future of a nerve
We are given such sacred material In these vaporized remains Perhaps you could remember
A tree or a breast
And begin again.